2) Bob has fallen into a special case in our accounting package (e.g. "joined company through acquisition"), causing his salary to be marked "exempt from standard rules", and his manager has not been diligent with raising it to the company norms.

3) #2, but manager knew what was happening and did nothing to correct it anyway. Bob never complained, after all, and it made manager's budgets easier to balance.

4) No individual human anywhere in the corporation is responsible for evaluating Bob's compensation. Whoops. He's an orphaned node on the org chart because he was assigned to division A but expensed to B for the duration of a project which has since been canceled, was informally lent to C, but nobody told A yet, C doesn't expect him on their books, and B was eliminated in a reorg last year.

5) #4, except it is more severe: no one is in charge of reviewing Bob's salary because no one knows Bob exists. (This one is funny folklore... until it isn't.)

6) Hiring manager is citing a policy which does not exist and has never existed. This entire thread is based on a mistaken premise to begin with.

7) Hiring manager is citing a policy which exists for all Systems Engineers but Bob is classified as a Programmer: Systems (II) by manager Dave in 1997. P:S(II) was deprecated in 2002 -- didn't you get the memo, Dave?

8) #7. Dave didn't get the memo because he died in 2001.